Author Works Magic With Words Of 'Tunnel'

Long awaited. Eagerly anticipated. Thirty years in the making. Such siren calls have sounded before - most recently luring us to Harold Brodkey's Runaway Soul and Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. Each time we wonder, could this be it? Our age's Ulysses? Our Magic Mountain?

Doubtless we'd be less disillusioned if we didn't keep getting our hopes up so high. Because William H. Gass has been working on The Tunnel nearly half his life, I wanted the novel to be a transfiguring experience.

Sometimes, it would seem, hopes are fulfilled instead of dashed.

The Tunnel strikes me as an extraordinary achievement, a literary treat with more than a few shocking tricks inside it. For 650 pages one of the consummate magicians of English prose pulls rabbits out of sentences and creates shimmering metaphors before your very eyes. He dazzles and amazes. But be warned: He does so on his own terms and some readers may be confused, bored or repulsed.

Barring a few deliberately dense, semi-philosophical sections, The Tunnel is by turns funny, lyrically beautiful, disturbing, pathetic and perplexing enough to keep scholars busy for decades. Throughout, Gass carefully smudges the line where the narrator's rhetorical exaggeration leaves off and a kind of real madness sets in. No doubt future graduate students will clarify these and other matters. For today's readers it is enough to pause, again and again, at such quietly perfect sentences as ''I do the dishes in this house and so I care about the cleanliness of tines'' or ''A shoe is a poor swatter; it has no holes and advertises its coming.''

Gass' prose invites admiration. Not so his hero, the historian William Frederick Kohler. A bigot and a Nazi sympathizer, this fat professor sexually exploits his students, mocks his colleagues, scorns his wife and ignores his children. Kohler (miner in German) is the kind of guy who casually sets fire to insects and somehow manages to strangle a pet cat. As a boy he swipes pennies and bicycles, as a student in 1930s Germany he lobs a brick through a Jewish store window on Kristallnacht. He also serves up four-letter words with five-star mastery; few of his opinions even gesture toward the politically correct.

Now middle-aged at the end of the '60s, he feels washed up, despondent, self-pitying and bitter. His sole interests have devolved to digging a tunnel in his basement and composing a preface to Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, his ''courageous revamp of the Third Reich and what it was.'' Unable to focus on his preface, he writes instead about himself and his unhappy, frustrating past.

What are we to make of Kohler? There lies the nub, the mystery of Gass' novel. At times Kohler enchants with his memories of boyhood reading, then repels us with what his lost mistress, Lou, once called his ''loathesome'' mind. Then again Kohler can be heartbreaking as he depicts his sorrowful childhood - alcoholic mother, crippled dad, obsessive aunt. He can make us see and smell those old corner candy stores, ride along on a Sunday drive in the country, feel the anguish of a birthday party to which no one comes, taste the breakfast he makes for himself. For all his sheer awfulness it's hard to determine whether he is finally a man more sinned against than sinning. ''My face simply serves as a place to put my palms.''

Kohler, I think, represents that insulted and injured party that resides deep, sometimes not so deep, inside all of us. Even in his work on the Third Reich, the historian wants, as he notes with sickly humor, to put himself ''in the villain's place, to imagine the unimaginable.'' Which, of course, is just what William Gass is triumphantly doing. In several senses, Kohler almost certainly descends from Dostoevsky's bitter, self-contradictory Underground Man.

Kohler's character will provoke debate. Gass' trickiness - is our ''hero'' actually constructing a tunnel or is he only digging into his past and self through his writing? - will keep one balanced between uncertainties.

At one point, Kohler remarks that ''the secret of life is paying absolute attention to what is going on.'' This is certainly how The Tunnel deserves to be read. It contains great beauty, as well as perversity and ugliness, much rage and a terrible sadness. ''Never look beneath the surface of life,'' writes Kohler, ''beneath the surface of life is the pit, the abyss, the awful truth.'' Perhaps Gass has managed, after all, to join his aestheticism to a moral fiction. By the end Kohler comes to seem a kind of fractured Everyman, broken by his past, his prejudices, his unfulfilled dreams. ''I cannot complain,'' he says for all of us. ''Yet I do. I do.''